[2023] Can we get a season of completing old storylines

Since the start of 2021, it's good to see Jagex has been trying to stay focused on a singular storyline as much as possible. For those of us "back in the day" you can remember that a dev would create a quest, and then it could be a 1, 2, even 3-5 years before it got a sequel. It wasn't until things like Spirit of Summer, Void Knights, and then the focus on 6th age content that the devs tried to keep a cohesive story arc going. (I'm not trying to push if the story arc was good or bad ... I'm just saying they stuck with it.)

Since Mod Jack took over, we've seen the age of gods returning brought to an end, the aftermath of it, and now the player becoming a minor lord.

All of these were new story lines. That's nice and all.

But can we finish off some quest lines that have been stalled for years?

The Fort Forinthry storyline is much like the Myreque, Elf/Plague, and Pirate series: it's at a point to where the narrative is "complete". Sequels can always happen, but whatever the main threat that was presented at the beginning has been resolved.

Desert, Gnome, and Elemental Workshop, for example, are 3 quests series that have been left unresolved. The Penguin series is ... probaly? ... in the same state.

The suggestion is take the opportunity to finish what was started so long ago to allow the rest of the game's story to progress.

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Despite appearances, I'm not actually averse to this. Part of the reason I spend so much time chatting to players on social media is just to keep myself constantly reminded of all the various options on the table. A kind of self-inflicted "daily reminder that you still didn't finish the gnome series." I've pitched various tie-ins at various times over the last few years (trying to fit gnomes in here or desert in there), there are just a bunch of factors to take into consideration.

One is a general strategy of tying content in with what else is going on. If we end up in a situation where we want a quest, and we also want something nearby for which Arposandra would be a really good option, then that would be a point in favour of gnome content. To an extent you can force anything to fit with anything else, but I mean something more inherently fitting. Elder Gods + God Wars Dungeon = Elder God Wars Dungeon. Likewise e.g. Runecrafting has a direct connection to the Abyss whereas a connection would have to be fabricated to the eastern lands.

Another is just pure dev investment. This is something we've been experimenting with a lot, but in general we get better results by letting developers focus on something that interests them rather than mandating that they work on something specific. This also creates awkward compromises - for example, two devs want to work on totally unrelated lore concepts (say Arposandra and Abbinah) and there's no real way to share assets without clumping them together in a way that feels like neither, that's not something we can just "do". Elemental Workshop is the most obvious example. Producing insane puzzles isn't something you can learn as you go - you really have to have a passion for it.

Sometimes on a project I will suggest possible lore tie-ins. This isn't quite the same as explicitly continuing a questline but it's in the same area with roughly the same considerations. Ultimately it kind of has to be up to the developer what plot points they choose to fold into their content - the EGW quests were very lore intense where I was mandating long lists of plot points that needed to be addressed, but ultimately that was untenable.

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